From Antonina Vallentin

The storm of the French Revolution attacked the princely graves anew, churches were destroyed and their dead disturbed in the name of new rights. Little is known of the fate of the chapel at Amboise in the time of the great Revolution. But if the grave weathered that storm, it fell victim at last to the picks and hatchets that brought down the crumbling, weather worn chapel, no longer safe to use, in 1808. The vandals who did the work of destruction sold the marble slabs and gravestones and even melted the lead of the coffins. The chapel became a heap of ruins on the castle hill, on which children played with the bones of the dead, playing ball with the grinning skulls until they disintegrated. One night a gardener collected the scattered remains and buried them together in the dark. The mortal remains were mixed with those of other men and with the soil beneath the sward of Amboise park, to be trodden upon for decades thereafter by indifferent visitors.
In the age of the Romantics, who knew what they owed to their dead, a French poet, Arsene Houssaye, made a search for the dead and forgotten Leonardo. Among skeletons of unknown persons he found the bleached bones of a tall man, and a large skull which might be assumed to have once contained the brain of that great genius. Houssaye reverently collected together the remains that seemed to belong to this skeleton, and buried the corpse in the chapel of St. Blaise, the chapel above whose proch little King Charles VIII prays in his great crown, with his thin hands folded. On the simple gravestone which now covers the mortal remains perhaps of Leonardo. perhaps of another person, an inscription was placed:

Under this stone
rest bones
collected during the
excavations in the former
royal chapel of Amboise
among which it is surmised
that there are the mortal remains
of Leonardo da Vinci